Do You Have a Digital Business Card? (Register for .tel for free)

Do You Have a Digital Business Card? (Register for .tel for free)

We all want to be found more easily online when our friends, potential clients and employers Google us. We’ve set up our LinkedIn profiles, started blogging, created websites, invited others to be our friends on Facebook and tweeted like crazy on Twitter. With all of these fragmented presences online, wouldn’t it be nice to have a directory of all the places we can be found, plus the option to include our email address, phone number and tags which help the right people find us and get in touch? That way, we could direct people to just one place to be referred to the various ways to contact us and find out what we’re up to. It’s sort of like a virtual phone book; you remember the phone book, don’t you? They used to be useful way back when, before we found contact information online and started using them only as doorstops and booster seats for kids not tall enough to reach the dining table.

There are plenty of easy ways to do this now. Each offers their own features and options for customization and discoverability. Among the options are:

Today, I am focusing on registering a .tel domain (you may be more familiar with other domains, such as .com, .net and .org). To help me understand the benefits of owning my .tel domain, I met with Vincent Largilliere of Digitrad, who was kind enough to walk me through the set-up. First, it is important to understand that registering a .tel domain is similar to registering any domain – it is not free, unlike the other sites I’ve listed above. For that fee, though, you have more control of your information because it is a completely different site, rather than just a page on someone else’s site. I encourage you to look at the features of each type of directory listing. There is no reason you can’t use more than one of the options above.

What is .tel?

The .tel allows you to store, publish and update online all your contact information and keywords under your unique domain name, without the need for a website

> For individuals, .tel is a business card fully secure and customizable.

> For companies, .tel is both a limited public directory open to customers, and a internal directory, complete and secure for you and your co-workers .

All the extensions are identical, .tel is different: classical extensions link a website to an address, .tel links an address to an identity. This is its specificity and main strength.

.tel will allow you to increase your visibility on the Internet, to optimize your referencing, but also and more importantly to manage your personal digital identity as you see it, with the flexibility and the security that you need

Want to register .tel for free?

Vincent has offered free registration of a .tel account for AlmostSavvy readers. If you’d like to grab a year’s free registration of your very own .tel account, take a look at the video and keep reading.

In the video, Vincent answers a few questions about the value of .tel and walks me through the set-up process. You’ll note that I had to do quite a bit of editing (it seems we both talk too much!).

Following our session, I continued the set-up process. Take a peek at IreneKoehler.tel now.

To get a code for free registration of your own .tel account, simply add a comment below sharing why you’d like to try it out. Be sure to add a valid email address in the appropriate field (that’s how I’ll get the code to you).

Many thanks to Vincent and Digitrad for offering free registration to AlmostSavvy readers to allow you to see for yourself how you might use it to your own best advantage to manage your online reputation and visibility.

Thanks also to the kind folks at the Skoll Foundation who loaned us their conference room to tape the interview above, and thanks to Adin Miller for connecting me with the Skoll Foundation.

Also, in the name of full disclosure, Vincent did buy me a crepe while I was in Paris attending LeWeb. The crepe was not in exchange for this blog post, but I understand that perception is everything. Frankly, if anyone ever wanted to compensate me for a blog post, I’d hope the going rate would be something greater than one crepe and an offer to give blog readers a discount code. Evidence of said crepe.

51 Comments

Thanks Irene for posting this; it’s a very neat concept. What would be the advantage of posting the information on a .tel site versus a Google Profile? How effectively does a .tel domain support SEO efforts?

Hello Adin, good question.
My answer is that with the .tel, you own your domain name, it’s yours, and anyone else can not buy it then. It’s a vanity URL that you own and then it can be displayed perfectly on any device, any phone connected to internet. The display will never be broken nor unstructured on any devices screens.

And, moreover, it’s better indexing as it uses DNS and NAPTER records for the info records. It uses this new technology to perform (and hence control) your online presence.

Thanks, Shellie. I will take you up on that offer next time I’m in Paris. This one was cold and without any filling (hardly worthy of a blog post), but it was a Parisian crepe nonetheless. I will get the information to you soon about how to sign up for the .tel account. Like .com domains, it is valuable real estate that you might want to reserve just for yourself before someone else gets it.

Okay, so you have an online business card… that implies it should be brief and tell someone only what they most want to know about you.

That implies name, title, email address, phone… what else should be on your virtual business card? Should it be literally the same amount of information as on a card or should it be essentially one “screen” of information (2-3 links to your profiles on LinkedIn, VisualCV, Naymz reputation, etc.)?

Good question, Marc. If you take a look at the image in the post, you’ll see that there are many options to include information and it is completely up to you what you’d like to include. You’ll see that I’ve included several links, a bit about myself, keywords to make my account more searchable. http://irenekoehler.tel

Have you heard of WebFinger? It entails the notion that your email address is your business card / persona identifier. Maybe a .tel would be a good lead on one’s WebFinger record… Gmail just enabled WebFinger for all of their public profiles…

Having not purchased a crepe for you, next time you’re in London, we’ll definitely get you some fish and chips!

I just wanted to let you and your readers know that there’s some more functionality coming down the line and the look and feel will change very soon – you can get a sneak peak of what a .tel name will look like here: http://telnic.org/newsletters/redesign-proxy.html

Thanks for the information, Justin. I like the changes very much and think they do a better job of keeping up with the other sites which allow for customization. Looking forward to the fish and chips in London!

I’d like to try out this .tel domain. I heard about it on Twitter. It looks like a convenient way to consolidate a lot of online information in one place. This could be useful for me or for some people I know.

Very interesting indeed…and something that I forgot even existed. Considering that ‘norcross’ is pretty much taken in every TLD I’ve looked for (damn Atlanta suburbs!) I’d love to grab something with just that.

I’d be very interested in trying this out, I have a blog and several other online profiles, I have my blog address and a couple other social media profiles printed on my business cards, would be cool to have the one site to go to to find all my information.

Thank you very much for extending this wonderful offer. We can use all the help we can get to make it easy for our friends, family and business associates to find us, and .tel domains appear to be another great tool to accomplish that goal quickly and easily.

Thanks for all your comments, questions, and feedback.
I gave Irene a lot of free vouchers for the US territory so feel free to ask her one to get your .tel domain name for free.
Do not hesitate to contact me if you have other questions,
Best,
Vincenthttp://largilliere.tel

I’m bored to update traditional business card information (after every change of contact information), so this .tel business card would be perfect tool for me. Any more vouchers available? Thanks in advance!

Hi Irene and Vincent, is this offer still available as there is no indiication that is not? I am interested but I tried a .tel once but didn’t really get any benefit from it, I now have findian.co instead, but I’m willing to give it another chance.

I notice your name Irene – irenekoehler.tel – is available so it seems you have chosen not to support this, why is that?

What I would like is the option of subdomains for different aspects or services of a business. That is easily done with all other TLD’s, so can it be done with .tel?

Hi Ian. You’ve stumbled across an old blog post. I no longer have access to offer free registrations. Very thorough of you to notice that the domain with my own name is available. I did use it for a couple of years, but decided not to renew it. These days, with so many profiles online – Google+, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. – it felt less relevant. I use about.me for a similar purpose, as a one page spot to find other ways to connect with me.

Hi Irene, thank you for your quick reply. There are quite a few of them now although I purchased findian.co because it is shorter and readable when placed in my Twitter avatar, which I think is an acceptable thing to do.

One thing I recommend is http://www.myonepage.com from the developers of Buffer, it is their first project and I think is fantastic, though as I type this seem to be server congestion as the site is the same server as Buffer.

I like your about.me page but one service rivalling about.me and which is possibly better in some ways is circle.me, my page is at http://www.circle.me/ian